With much ballyhoo, the electric vehicle started
shipping in some volume in 2010. The vehicles were introduced as
the way to break our dependence on oil and clean up the smog in the
air. The companies manufacturing the cars had the backing of the
federal government providing up to a $7,500 income tax credit, but
they are still a price premium. The Chevy Volt sells for about
$40,000 and the Nissan LEAF for about $32,000. The price is
certainly a detraction for a mostly unknown product. For example,
the batteries are warrantied for 8 years and are expected to last
for 10. But, replacing them could be prohibitively expensive
somewhere around $10,000.

Having said all that I think these EVs are a
great idea, and I want to buy one, but I think, like many of you,
I’m not ready to take a chance on a technology that could
strand me out in the middle of nowhere where there’s
nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles and no
electric-charging services. Right now, the Nissan LEAF
(www.nissanusa.com) only gets from 62 to 138 miles between charges,
and that’s just not good enough. There are others that
are better like the Coda sedan (Coda Automotive, www.codaautomotive.com)
that uses Li-iron-phosphate batteries to get up to 150 miles on a
charge. There are other cars like the Tesla 300 that say they get
as much as 300 miles per charge, but you’ll have to pay
about $70,000 for that capability. It’s a difficult
decision to buy EV, but it becomes easier to wait with prices this
high.

On the upside, EVs do offer us a way to break
the connection to oil, a depleting energy resource. Or do they? We
need to have serious discussions about the value of a vehicle that
will have to be charged from the electric grid. Will they mean that
we need more power generation plants to handle the EVs? Some say
that most cars will be charged at home simply for the convenience.
By 2015, access to vehicle charging will be available at more than
one million charge points in the United States, according to a Pike
Research report, “Electric Vehicles on the
Grid” (
www.pikeresearch.com/research/electric-vehicles-on-the-grid).
Utilities in the U.S. will slowly see revenue from vehicle charging
increase from $3 million in 2010 to more than $200 million in 2015.
The added demand will have little overall impact on grid
reliability, but could diminish performance in neighborhoods with
the highest EV concentrations. Utilities will prepare for the
additional load to the grid by tracking vehicle sales and creating
new customer-billing programs. The report examines the many open
questions surrounding business models and technology issues for
electric-vehicle-charging infrastructure. It analyzes and forecasts
the market for residential, public, private, and workplace charging
stations through 2015 as well as examining operational and
technological impacts of plug-in hybrid and battery electric
vehicles on the grid infrastructure.

According to Ed Kjaer, director of Southern
California Edison’s electric transportation advancement
program, the major challenge for EVs is how thousands of
power-hungry vehicles would tax distribution transformers at the
local level. Each of these transformers handle the electricity load
for about 10 average-size homes. Adding a plug-in car to the grid
is equal to about a third of a house. Early adopters will likely
spring up in the same areas and that could mean overloaded
transformers caused by plug-in cars that could lead to power
outages. However, much of the overload to the transmission system
could be mitigated by having users plugging their cars in during
off-peak hours or having a large network of charging stations (you
know, like we have now for gas cars).

What this may mean is that for real commercial
viability we need government officials to take some risks and
encourage placing charging stations in home residences and
elsewhere. EV infrastructure investment, according to David Leeds,
head of Smart Grid practice at GTM Research (www.greentechmedia.com),
is centered on electric delivery via the charging stations. As more
public stations and home chargers are used, investment in a new
generation of dynamic grid devices will be imperative. Leeds said
that smart grid technologies such as next generation tap changers,
voltage regulators, capacitor banks and reclosers, and the
communication networks to support these smart devices will bring a
new level of grid optimization and control. This he said will
enable EVs to safely scale into the tens and hundreds of millions.
I hope he’s right, but logically I have serious
doubts.